CALIFORNIA’S DOLDRUMS CONTINUE

A new low: We learned last week that even companies in tax-heavy, regulation-larded New York don’t want to do business in California.

As reported in the U-T San Diego, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the New York City-based pharma behemoth that last summer swallowed up La Jolla-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals, decided to close the doors of its San Diego facilities by the end of next year.

“We plan to have all work being done in San Diego transitioned to other Bristol-Myers Squibb sites” by the close of 2014, BMS spokesman Frederick Egenolf announced in a statement.

After laying off 100 Amylin employees shortly after the merger, Bristol-Myers now plans to try to relocate some 100 to 125 remaining workers to its other facilities in such tax-free meccas as New Jersey, Connecticut, Belgium, and Japan.

Fate, however, will be less kind to the other 300 Amylin personnel, whom Egenolf described as filling “commercial, R&D, manufacturing, corporate staff and administrative roles,” to say nothing of the 266,000 soon-to-be vacant square feet flooding an already depressed commercial real estate market.

Interestingly, the Amylin jobs outside of California are apparently being preserved. “Amylin has 300-plus employees at a manufacturing plant in West Chester, Ohio,” Egenolf noted, “and nearly 400 in field-based sales and medical roles. These positions are being integrated into Bristol-Myers Squibb.” But too bad, so sad for the Californian Amylin alums; say goodbye to another 500 high-skilled, well-paying, mostly North County-based jobs.

To be fair, BMS didn’t expressly say it was shuttering its Golden State facilities because of our hostile business, regulatory, and tax climate. The company didn’t offer a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sayonara to our unfriendly confines. After all, Bristol-Myers still needs to sell its products to our still-somewhat-teeming masses.

But if the company isn’t exactly leaving California screaming, its departure nonetheless speaks volumes about our state and where it’s heading. While some liberal pundits – I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman – have lately waxed euphoric about our supposed “comeback,” we’re still heading down the wrong track.

In their new book “Freedom in the 50 States,” two political science professors observe that some 1.5 million Californians decamped for other states between 2000 and 2010, accounting for about 4% of our population.

Our state’s not-so-golden regulatory and tax scheme, wrote William Ruger and Jason Sorens in the U-T last week, “costs Californians billions of dollars a year, makes their lives harder, and encourages more and more of them to move somewhere else.”

Ruger and Sorens, like many before them, attribute these negative results to outlandish zoning regulations, absurd labor and employment laws (e.g. high minimum wage, crazy workers comp allowances), and onerous licensing requirements for almost every profession and trade.

On the upside, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget appears to be in balance, but only thanks to the Proposition 30 tax hike sugar high that will surely cost the state in the long run, as more businesses and executives flee the state and its highest-in-the-nation marginal rates. According to Victor Davis Hanson – a Hoover Institution scholar, historian, and second-generation Central Valley farmer – a scant 144,000 Golden State households “accounted for about 50 percent of the aggregate state-income-tax revenue – and personal income taxes usually account for about 50 percent to 60 percent of all state revenues.”